The present invention relates to allocating computing resources and more particularly to allocating such resources in a distributed environment.
Enterprises are increasingly reliant on the availability of their information systems. Concurrently, they face decreasing budgets for implementing these information systems. A challenge exists in achieving high availability solutions using commoditized, low-cost equipment, without requiring application modifications or re-writes. Achieving this goal requires an ability to adapt existing applications, whether custom developed or commercially available, to a distributed environment, such as a grid or cluster environment, without modification.
Enterprises typically have two choices with regard to implementing applications on a distributed environment. First, the enterprise may achieve scalability and availability through specialized computational platforms (e.g., high capacity and/or high availability systems). High availability systems are very expensive, and high capacity systems are expensive, represent single sources of failure, and are designed with capacity limits that can only be surpassed by substitution with a different design.
Second, an enterprise may perform custom application development for its distributed infrastructure. If an application has not been specifically written to run on a distributed infrastructure, then the application must be run on a single computer, which inherently suffers from poor scalability and availability. Very few commercial applications are written to run on a distributed infrastructure; those few that are so written are provided in discrete functionality subsets that must be run on single computers, for which the same scalability/availability issues apply.
Thus for an enterprise having a distributed environment, if the enterprise desires an application to be operated across a set of computers (e.g., servers) in the environment, it must rewrite the application for such operation. Alternately, an application may be executed on a single server which is not accessible to the other computers in the environment.
A need thus exists to permit applications written for a single platform to be run without modification in a distributed environment, thus achieving scalability and high availability.